Word: nicaragua
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...appear reasonable, U.S. officials dangle the possibility that the Administration's demand for internal democracy in Nicaragua is still open to interpretation. Says a senior Washington policymaker: "The question that concerns us is the way the regime holds power. That does not mean the Sandinistas have to go." What he has in mind is a Nicaraguan election that would include such figures as the contra leaders, who are currently banned from the country as traitors. In return, the election results would receive Washington's blessing, even if, as State Department officials expect, the Sandinistas win. Says a Washington...
Behind such expressions of State Department impatience is a feeling that Nicaragua's ruling nine-member National Directorate is split over the strategy that it should pursue in the negotiations. The prevailing speculation among U.S. policymakers is that Junta Coordinator Ortega, who is also the Sandinista candidate for President in the November elections, leads a pragmatic faction that is tempted to make concessions. According to that analysis, Ortega's hard-line opponents on the Directorate are led by Interior Minister Tomás Borge Martinez. Other experts are less certain of the Ortega-Borge division, but according...
Ultimately, that point of view depends on the assumption that Nicaragua is a country backed close to the wall and that the Sandinistas are aware that their plight might worsen if Ronald Reagan is reelected. There is, in fact, little doubt that Nicaragua is now in trouble economically, and has suffered from attacks by the marauding contras. Robert Leiken, a senior fellow with the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, describes Nicaragua's economic situation as "really rough, just unbelievable." Leiken cites food shortages in the countryside, wildcat strikes in Sandinista-controlled trade unions and widespread protests against...
...coalition, led by Arturo Cruz Sequeira, a onetime junta member, had refused to register for the Nov. 4 elections, charging that Sandinista restrictions on political freedom made a truly democratic race impossible. Said Democratic Representative John Bryant of Texas, an opponent of Reagan Administration policies who was in Nicaragua last week on a fact-finding trip: "The signs of a [democratic] election are pretty negative, and that's discouraging to me as someone who voted against aid for the contras...
Meanwhile, in Nicaragua's northern border regions, the Nicaraguan Democratic Force (F.D.N.) was forging ahead with a new campaign. TIME's Jon Lee Anderson traveled to meet the rebels in the remote Bocay River valley in the department of Jinotega. Ferried to a rendezvous point controlled by the rebels about 50 miles from the border with Honduras, he met with the F.D.N.'s top military commander, Enrique Bermúdez Varela. Anderson reported that the rebel troops appeared "well fed, well armed and confident of eventual victory," despite their apparent loss of U.S. covert support. According...